Stefano Zacchiroli blogged about
how
donations to Debian are used by the project. First of all, Stefano
explained how money is used in the Debian Project: to buy hardware and
hardware-related services for Debian infrastructure, to sponsor
contributor sprints, or to support travel expenses in order to allow
Debian Developers to represent Debian at conferences and meetings.
Then, Stefano noted that almost all donations to Debian come from private
citizens and not from big corporate sponsors: corporates mostly sponsor
DebConf (the Debian annual conference).
At the end, Stefano pointed out that it's possible to check
how Debian spends donated money: by reading the
minutes of SPI monthly
meetings or the
list
of sprints, visiting the
DPL wiki page and consulting
the
DebConf reports. Stefano also
added that over the next month he will be working to further improve the
transparency of Debian's budget.